I know, I said (and you expected) that I wouldn’t do this. Truth be told is I saw this as the best solution to my lack of writing lately. Don’t think of this as a blog. Think of this as medicine. This is the drug that will cure me of my writing apathy.

I’ve been toying with the idea ever since I started reading Tadow’s ice-cold posts on his trip to Brazil for my wedding (hats off gents, you made it). Getting back to writing seemed like the cure for my pre-life crisis so I tossed aside the thoughts of self-pity despair and opened up my dusty journal from college (it was in a box somewhere). That was useless too because so much had changed after college.

For one thing, I got married.

Yes, this changes things somewhat. I’ll get into that later because I know it will take me way off course.

Also, living with the parents, as harmonious and economic as it is, rarely provides the necessary sense of worldliness to which I’ve become accustomed. Let’s face it, when you’re settled into your place in university with no one to be accountable to and such that everything is in its place, all studying is accounted for, friends have been visited, fun has been had and all you’re waiting for to top off the day is for it to finish, sitting yourself down and putting words on paper is just easier. You pour the whisky, draw the blinds, unplug the phone and tell the general public to fuck off. Call it an evening.

Another set-back is that prose is very different from poetry. It’s easy to wow people with poetry, provided that you’re not a gutless sap who thinks that pitiful misery and woe = good poetry. Puppy-dogs and daffodils by themselves also don’t do much. It needs feeling, soul, and most importantly, the creativity to transfer said feeling and soul onto paper, using the malleable characteristics of language. It’s all there for the taking.

But people don’t get poetry. It’s hard for them to focus on it and be engrossed in it. For those that are capable, the brain and mind are also malleable, functional structures in the body that can and should be exercised like muscles in a Rec Center junkie. When this detail hit me it sent me darting to the nearest public library.

Two nights with Mr. Vonnegut’s writings was enough to get me started again. Granted, these are not glory days yet, but someday they may be, and when that day comes, we must have the appropriate documentation. And since I’ve been reading more prose lately I’m seeing some of the things it can do that poetry simple can’t reach.

And I dig it. Anything that can capture the attention of others for more than a few minutes and is capable of informing an otherwise ignorant band of yokels is worth learning about. And anyone that can make a living doing it knows something about life that I don’t. Let’s see how that turns out.

So without going so much into the why, let’s talk how and what and stumble into the unpatterned frequency of future days. This is me, buying my ticket. It won’t be easy and it may even get a bit weird, but the tough can’t be broken.

Pedro Ávila

For a reasonably sane & productive member of society (arguable, but let’s not complicate things), I’m far too mobile and unrooted. I travel quite a bit for a job that is simultaneously my greatest privilege and my worst burden.

So I write. And I write. Travel pieces, political journalism (a stretch from ranting but, still), short stories, poetry and other such riff-raff. I contribute to a handful of publications and will probably just keep going until something gives out, or someone gives in.